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Obama loses ‘peacemaker’ legacy

“President Obama responsibly ended the war in Iraq and will end the war in Afghanistan.” That was the simple boast made by Barack Obama’s re-election campaign in the fall of 2012.

Three years later, it lies in tatters.

On Thursday, Obama announced a reversal of his pledge to pull all combat forces from Afghanistan by the end of next year, saying he’ll leave 5,500 troops in the country through the end of his presidency. Meanwhile the U.S. is back in Iraq, where 3,000 troops support a major air campaign against the Islamic State.

Once again, a president who aspired to be a peacemaker has found himself unable to escape conflict. And a leader who hoped for a foreign policy legacy built around the idea of ending wars has been forced to continue them.

After remarks announcing his policy shift on Tuesday, Obama told a reporter that the decision was “not disappointing,” though sources who have spoken with him about Afghanistan doubt that. Not that Obama hasn’t been here before. Four years ago, he stuck to his plan for a troop withdrawal from Iraq, a foundation of his original run for president in 2008, despite warnings it was premature. The country plunged back into chaos soon after—an outcome Obama is determined to avoid repeating in Afghanistan.

For Obama’s foreign policy critics, who have long said exiting Afghanistan next year was an unrealistic goal, it’s a told-you-so moment. But some maintain that even the training and counter-terror force Obama has embraced amounts to a Band Aid for an Afghan nation in need of a respirator.

“It’s not enough,” Senate Armed Services Committee chairman John McCain told POLITICO in an interview. McCain said a resurgent Taliban could capture territory and population centers the way the Islamic State did after the U.S. left Iraq. “We’re going to see the Iraq movie again,” he added.

Others described a slow awakening by Obama to a world that did not want to cooperate with his original foreign policy vision.

From the start of his presidency, Obama has found peace making an elusive goal.

“Obama seems belatedly to be getting that the biggest international problem is not ‘America’s wars,’” said James Jeffrey, a former deputy national security adviser to George W. Bush and a U.S. ambassador to Iraq under Obama. “’Ending wars’ is no longer as important as defending the global system. And he is recognizing that bit by bit.”

From the start of his presidency, Obama has found peace making an elusive goal. In addition to being dragged back into Iraq, he has bombed Syria, stepped up a drone campaign in Pakistan and Yemen and supported a Saudi-led military operation in Yemen. Two efforts to achieve an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement hit dead ends, and violence has flared in that region. U.S. efforts to help settle Syria’s civil war have gone nowhere.

Those episodes will darken a foreign policy legacy that had some shine just a few weeks ago, after Obama sealed the Iran nuclear deal, renewed diplomatic relations with Cuba, and won Congressional approval of “fast track” authority for his coveted Trans Pacific Partnership trade agreement.

Since then, Obama has endured a torrent of setbacks, from the failure of a Pentagon program to train moderate Syrian rebels to Russia’s military intervention in Syria to the Taliban’s startling capture of the Afghan city of Kunduz last month.

Aides made no apology for his about-face in Afghanistan, where Obama had hoped to leave only a small embassy protection force for his successor.

They noted that Obama followed through on an original promise to refocus America’s attention from Iraq to Afghanistan and rid the country of dangerous terrorists. Obama has overseen the decimation al Qaeda’s core leadership in Afghanistan and Pakistan. And he and Secretary of State John Kerry helped midwife last year’s democratic election and transfer of power from president Hamid Karzai to his successor, Ashraf Ghani.

“When it comes to what we have done inside Afghanistan, the president has advanced the vision he laid out in his 2008 campaign,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said.

Kunduz was more a final straw than a reason for the change in policy.

Obama himself stressed that Afghan forces have taken the combat lead, with the U.S. playing a supporting role. The major offensives of Obama’s first term are long over. (During Obama’s first two years in office, more than 900 U.S. troops died in Afghanistan. So far just 16 Americans have been killed in action this year.)

But there are clear limits to the readiness and capability of the Afghan forces, which are incurring battlefield casualties at a rate U.S. commanders call unsustainable. Afghans also failed to keep the Taliban from seizing the provincial capital Kunduz, a city of more than 250,000.

Still, Kunduz was more a final straw than a reason for the change in policy.

“The driving force on this was probably the clear sense that things were slipping in a security mode even before it got to Kunduz. There were a lot of really scary things happening well before Kunduz,” said a source familiar with administration deliberations on Afghanistan. “Kunduz was kind of the glue” for the final decision, the source added.

The liberation of Kunduz unwittingly showed why Obama badly wants to extricate America from foreign conflicts. During the fighting, a U.S. strike on a Médecins Sans Frontières hospital in the city killed 12 doctors and 7 patients. The attack is being investigated and its cause remains unclear.

Barely mentioned at the White House on Thursday is the role of Pakistan, whose intelligence service retains influence within the Afghan Taliban. The U.S. recently warned Pakistan’s government that it might withhold $300 million in military assistance if Islamabad doesn’t do more to restrain militants who have attacked U.S. and Afghan forces across the border. Many officials and experts warn that Afghanistan cannot be stabilized unless Pakistan, which sees the Taliban as a proxy force protecting its interests there, allows it, possibly by encouraging peace talks with the Afghan government.

“Make no mistake: we can’t succeed in Afghanistan or secure our homeland unless we change our Pakistan policy,” Obama said in a July 2008 campaign speech. “We must expect more of the Pakistani government.”

More than seven years later, U.S.-Pakistan policy remains tortured, many analysts say, and Islamabad’s behavior has barely changed. Obama will welcome Pakistan’s prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, at the White House next week. Afghanistan is certain to be on the agenda.

“A decade of war is now ending,” Obama declared in his 2013 inaugural address.